How to use Xargs Command in Linux

xargs is a very powerful command that takes output of a command and pass it
as argument of another command. Following are some practical examples on
how to use xargs effectively.

1. When you are trying to delete too many files using rm, you may get error
message: /bin/rm Argument list too long – Linux. Use xargs to avoid this
problem.
find ~ -name ‘*.log’ -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

2. Get a list of all the *.conf file under /etc/. There are different ways to get
the same result. Following example is only to demonstrate the use of xargs.
The output of the find command in this example is passed to the ls –l one by
one using xargs.

# find /etc -name "*.conf" | xargs ls –l

3. If you have a file with list of URLs that you would like to download, you can
use xargs as shown below.

# cat url-list.txt | xargs wget –c

4. Find out all the jpg images and archive it.

# find / -name *.jpg -type f -print | xargs tar -cvzf
images.tar.gz

5. Copy all the images to an external hard-drive.
# ls *.jpg | xargs -n1 -i cp {} /external-hard-
drive/directory